Richard Saumarez

Richard Saumarez FRS FRSE FSA FRCS (13 November 1764 – 28 January 1835) was a British surgeon and medical author.

Saumarez was a prolific writer, with advanced ideas regarding the subject of medicine and medical education. Coleridge identified and praised Saumarez for his "masterly force of reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology; established not only the existence of final causes, but their necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name of philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England." (Biographia Literaria, Chapter 12)